The Parting of the Ways
by Zamael
Summary: The world was dying. A horrible force was on a rampage, killing everything in its path. And the Avatar was dying, too, at the worst possible moment. He couldn't afford to die, and so he used the last resort. Drabble, crossoverish.


He was dying. Aang was dying and there was nothing she could do.

Katara had tried her best. She had done, in her opinion, a moderately decent job in mending the wounds and ending the blood loss, but that had taken forever and he had had time to lose a great deal of blood before. And he was still a mess from the inside: Countless broken bones, smashed organs, a punctured lung. He kept coughing blood every now and then, no matter what she did: He was doing it right now.

"Katara...", he whispered, a terrible pain echoing from his voice. She wondered whether it was possible for him to actually hurt more than she did, and if it was, how much pain he actually was feeling right now. "I'm going to die... Aren't I?"

"Aang-", she started, fighting back tears. She was going to tell him that he was going to live, that everything was going to be okay, but he cut her off. "Don't lie to me. I know just as well that I'm as good as dead now. Just listen..."

He coughed blood again, and remained silent for a second or two even afterwards, collecting his thoughts. "Look, I'm supposed to... reincarnate now. In normal circumstances, that is. I'm supposed to leave you behind." He smiled, a calming, soothing kind of a smile, the kind that gave hope. "Only... it's a bit different this time. Because the world only has a month or two to live, unless I do something. You're all gonna die if I go away now. I can't afford to die. Not today." To her horror, he sat up, gritting his teeth in pain and grunting. "So I'm going to do the last resort."

"Aang-!" When he stood up, Katara tried to force him back to bed, but he waved her away from him: "Stand back." And then a sudden and forceful gust of wind threw her backwards, away from him. Once she had managed to recall her balance, Aang was already up, albeit in a crouching, painful looking position, holding his stomach with both his hands.

"Okay... Now, you see, Avatars can sometimes, well, we can cheat death, kinda. And...", he grunted again in pain, "we're not supposed to do it... Unless we absolutely have no choice. It's a bit like I reincarnated except... faster. You'll see." A pause, with a coughing of blood. She tried to approach him but he waved her back.

"I'm gonna change, though. This'll be the last time you see this face. But then again... then again, we both know it's the inside that matters, right?" He laughed, painfully but happily, and she couldn't help but smile back at him.

She was crying now. Something, mainly her adamant trust to Aang, told her that he was not going to leave her after all, which gave her hope. But she was crying anyway, because she had fought back tears for so long, when she thought he was going to die. And of course, it also helped that she had no idea what was going to happen next.

"I reckon this is gonna be great. Because I won't have to leave you, like I did if I reincarnated. Get a second chance. I mean..." Another short pause. "I know it hasn't been exactly the best of kind of times for the two of us these last few months. For many reasons."

Another pause. Aang grinned: It was the usual, happy grin, the one she had fallen in love with, like he wasn't going to die after all. "When this is all over, we're going on a date. Okay?" And then she couldn't help it: She smiled too.

Then he burst into flames.

Or that was how it looked like, anyway. He had become a light source, as bright as a sun, and it hurt Katara's eyes to look at him. But she did not look away.

--

Sokka was worried. Not that this was any big news, of course: The Avatar was dying, at the worst possible moment. Everyone was worried.

They had the whole old gang - Sokka, Toph, Zuko, Suki, Mai, Ty Lee, everyone else - gathered outside that small hut at the Southern Water Tribe. Katara had given them strict orders not to go inside, and everyone obeyed: Being the Avatar's wife, and a very scary person in general, nobody in their right mind would disobey her.

When the hut was illuminated in a golden light from within, Sokka was the first to get up. He was only stopped by Toph, sitting next to him, grabbing his hand, quite forcefully, with her own. Physically she was looking down towards the ground, but Sokka, and everybody else, knew that in reality she was keenly observing the insides of the hut. "What's going on in there?", he asked her, but received no answer.

The light lasted several seconds before fading away. It was followed by minutes of perfect silence: All the talking, the chatting and laughter, desperate to keep everyone's hopes up, had stopped, as everyone was looking straight at the hut, to wait what happened next - except for Toph, of course, whose jaw had dropped. Clearly something, well, jaw-dropping, had happened inside, and Sokka wanted to see the results.

Then, finally, two people stepped out. The first, walking in a fast pace towards them and grinnind widely, was a Water Tribe man Sokka didn't recognize: He had a long, dark hair, and blue eyes, as people from the Water Tribes usually did. Curiously enough, he was wearing orange clothing and blood-soaked bandages, much like Aang had been wearing a while back. The second was Katara, who looked like she had seen a ghost. Or two, or three. Or one really big ghost. Then the other man reached Sokka, punching him into the shoulder in a playful, not-all-that-rough manner.

"Sokka!", he started, in a loud, cheerful voice. "Worried about me? I'm sure you did." Then he started to turn his attention to the other people at the camp. "Toph! Zuko! Everyone okay here? Everything in order? Suki, how're you doing! Yeah, everything's all right now, I'm all right now..." Then he stopped. His grin faded away, to be replaced by a pensive, slightly confused experession, as if he had forgotten something. "Oh yeah, there was something important I had to tell you," he finally said. "Something really important, what was it... Oh, that's right!"

The grin snapped back like it had never been away. "I'm going to save the world!" Toph was the first to move when he started to slope, losing his posture and leaning towards the ground. "Again!", he had time to yell, before hitting the snow and speaking no more.

Then Katara reached them too, and while some people had crouched at this new guy, to see if he was okay, Sokka went to his sister. "What's going on in here?", he begun his barrage of questions, angry and confused, at her. "Who is this guy? What's he talking about? How come you allowed him to the tent but not me, your own brother? Where's Aang?"

There was a short silence, before her response: "That's him," she pointed at the new man, still lying at the ground. "That's Aang."

Sokka's gaze darted from her to him. He didn't understand. And so he asked one more question, one that packed up all his feelings and confusion into a nice good summary: "What?"

"She's not lying, you know," Toph clarified. "That really is Aang."

Sokka continued to look at all three - Katara, Toph, and the man that was supposed to be Aang - for a little while. Then he fainted too.

--

A/C: Credit goes to a certain popular british TV show, of which I compeletely ripped this off and shamelessly turned into Avatar version. The main character does this kind of stuff a lot. This to give people better understanding of what happened and that I meant it as a homage instead of stealing.

Edit: Dialogue revision, to make it look a bit less like a compelete rip-off.


End file.
